Decked out in a bright yellow jacket with Cressi’s logo featured prominently on it was Brazilian spearfisherman Francisco Loffredi, the company’s newest sponsored athlete.

A member of the Brazilian National Spearfishing Team, Loffredi won the 2013 La Paz World Cup Invitational Spearfishing Championship (also known informally as the Blue Water World Cup) in the Sea of Cortez off the Mexican coast.

Loffredi says he “met the Cressi people at the world championships last year in Peru. We started talking, the invited me, I went to Genova a month ago, [it was the] happiest day of my life. I met Mr. Cressi, had lunch with Mr. Cressi, I toured the factory, got a ton of gear. I’m happy to see that they knew of all the stuff I’d been doing for the past 20 years, so [there was] good recognition of my accomplishments.”

Loffredi said his next competition would be the upcoming La Paz World Cup Invitational Spearfishing Championship in July, the same one he won two years ago.

“I think this kind of competition which is focused on few, quality fish instead of many small fish like the traditional world championship is, that’s the evolution of this sport,” he said, adding: “That’s the direction we’re going. And so I have more pleasure in this kind of competition than in the traditional CMAS” championships.

When Loffredi won the tournament in 2013, he says he shot seven fish in five days. “It’s like a fish and a half a day, and at the world championship you have to shoot 30 small fish,”Loffredi said, adding: “The rules were created 60 years ago, 70 years ago; it was another time, and the sport was different. So I see that as the evolution.”

John Liang is the News Editor at DeeperBlue.com. He first got the diving bug while in High School in Cairo, Egypt, where he earned his PADI Open Water Diver certification in the Red Sea off the Sinai Peninsula. Since then, John has dived in a volcanic lake in Guatemala, among white-tipped sharks off the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica, and other places including a pool in Las Vegas helping to break the world record for the largest underwater press conference.